Communitarian private safety nets functioned as cover for welfare-state dismantling

Evidence

Communitarianism and neoliberalism thereby entered an uneasy alliance in Putnam’s vision. As an already meagre American welfare state was dismantled or commercialized by successive presidential administrations, families and neighborhood groups were promoted as private social safety nets. The AIDS crisis of the 1990s, for instance, was not met with an expansion of healthcare provision; in fact, many American gay men lost insurance coverage as their sexual orientation came to be considered an “uninsurable risk.” At the same time, banks discovered in this same demographic a new credit market, from which they had previously been excluded. Efforts to legalize same-sex marriage also gathered steam, allowing gay couples with the means to do so to set aside savings in the event of an emergency. It offered a textbook case of what Nancy Fraser would later term “progressive neoliberalism,” albeit with a faintly conservative inflection. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 99

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely defines ‘progressive neoliberalism’ (Nancy Fraser’s term) through the AIDS-era treatment of gay Americans as both uninsurable and a new credit market.
• XREF: Modernizes the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ moral-panic frame: here privatization converts a demonized demographic into a niche financial market.
• STORYSTEM: The AIDS crisis as parallel universe of exclusion and market inclusion — insurance uninsurability next to banks newly courting the same men — is rich narrative material about capital finding profit in abandonment.